There seems to be no shortage of arcade-style pads for both Android, iPad, and iPhone. Still, among a sea of accessories, one of the most well known devices in this niche is none other than the iCade. What was already good is becoming great.

This unique arcade cabinet is getting a new, streamlined version that is still just for the iPad but this time offers a better design and a specially design cradle that allows you to easily load and unload your iPad safely while still delivering a secure fit.

The new iCade model, the “iCade Core”, connects through bluetooth and allows you to easily swivel your rotation for games from horizontal to vertical, depending on your game.

While the authentic arcade-style joystick and button layout remain in tact, the new model enables owners more flexibility in design, and an overall less obtrusive design than the original.

The iCade Core will hit stores sometime later this year, but as of now we have no official word on the pricing for the new model.

For the iPod or iPhone, the new iCade Mobile could be what you’re looking for. Set for release in Q2 2012, the iCade Mobile adds four shoulder buttons, four face buttons and a dpad to your device. Landscape and portrait modes are supported, this one is $80.

If you are looking for something a bit more retro like the original iCade, iPhone or iPod touch gamers can keep an eye on the iCade Jr, it looks like its in prototype stages now.

[ source ]

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Our computers in their simplest form are just a series of tiny electronic circuits containing transistors that switch on and off in certain patterns to execute the functions that we need. At their conception computers were created using only one core processor; this is what reads and performs instructions. Now a computer that has at least two processors is commonplace, and with higher end systems having up to 16 cores.

But Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell have had a technological breakthrough and successfully developed a processor with more than 1000 cores on a single chip.

They achieved this feat by using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which contains transistors just like all other microchips, but they are unique in that rather than having their functions set at the assembly line, the circuits are essentially a blank slate and can be customized by the user. Dr. Vanderbauwhede was able to separate the transistors into small groups and assign them each to perform a different task. This effectively created 1000 small circuits in the chip, and as a result a 1000-core processor with each individual core capable of working solely on its own instructions was born.

Dr. Vanderbauwhede said: “FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker – so they are also a greener option.”

They then tested the chip by processing an algorithm that is central to MPEG videos, like those used on YouTube; they came up with a speed of 5 GB/s, which is 20 times faster than current high-end desktops.

Nowadays it is expected that a computer should have a multi-core processor, they all still have to share access to only one memory source, consistently slowing down the computer. Dr. Vanderbauwhede and his team increased efficiency by giving each core is own separate amount memory.

He is planning to present his developments at the International Symposium on Applied Reconfiguable Computing in March.

[UKPA via Daily Mail]

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